The U.S. is Propping Up a Dictatorship in Honduras

By David Noriega on February 9, 2018

The inauguration ceremony for Juan Orlando Hernández’s second term as president of Honduras was held in a sparsely attended stadium guarded by hundreds of soldiers and police officers decked out in riot gear. Outside, in the streets of Tegucigalpa, protesters did what they’ve been doing since November, when Hernández went against the country’s constitution to run for a second term: They blocked roads, burned tires, and chanted, using the president’s initials, “Out with JOH!”

Hernández’s re-election represents a political and social crisis for the already-fragile nation, and casts new light on the U.S.’s complicated relationship with its most important ally in Central America — namely, its history of supporting Honduras’s armed forces while turning a blind eye to the corruption, power grabs, and violence that critics say have put the country on the path to authoritarianism.

Honduras’s constitution explicitly forbids a president from running for a second term, but Hernández ran anyway. Then, after international observers found multiple signs of fraud in the election, the electoral tribunal controlled by Hernández’s party declared him the victor. The country erupted in protest, and the government responded with force, at times firing live rounds into crowds of demonstrators. Some 30 people have died in the violence thus far.

Today’s crisis has roots going back almost a decade, and has been consistently enabled by the United States. In 2009, President José Manuel Zelaya was ousted in a military coup engineered by the National Party, which remains in power today.

The justification for the coup was that Zelaya was setting himself up for re-election — which is precisely what Hernández went on to do last year, except successfully. After initially condemning the coup in 2009, the United States then reversed course: Hillary Clinton’s State Department endorsed the coup regime by allowing it to hold new elections without restoring Zelaya to power.

https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/kzpabe/the-us-is-propping-up-a-dictatorship-in-honduras

Source: Vice News